WordPress Plugins I Use and Love

I get asked all the time what plugins I use on my WordPress site.  So I thought I would just share them with everyone.

These are the WordPress plugins I use and love.  Some are free and some are premium plugins but they all add some great features to WordPress and make my life a little easier. Of course, depending on my current needs on a particular site, I may use other plugins as well but these are the ones that are a must for me.

The premium plugins listed below may contain my affiliate links.  If you purchase through that link, it just means that I may get a commission from that purchase.

Akismet – Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.

Backup Buddy - Back up your entire WordPress installation. Widgets, themes, plugins, files and SQL database - the entire package!

Shareaholic - Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu and related content widget to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three.

Contact Form 7 - Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, Nar du spiller amerikansk roulette , vil alle bet du gjor, bortsett fra en, gi huset en fordel pa 5. CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Formidable Forms - Formidable Pro makes it dead simple to build any kind of form you want within seconds. With pure, drag and drop controls and in-place editing you don’t need to know the first thing about HTML or CSS to create extremely effective forms immediately. Restrict forms to logged-in users, allow them to edit previous responses, and display the user-generated or admin-generated posts and content.

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate - Automatically convert keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. Also manage, track, cloak and shorten unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location of Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate.

S3Video Plugin - The S3 Video Plugin allows the embedding of video media stored on Amazon"s S3 storage into a WordPress blog post or page.

CommentLuv - Reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. Encourage a community and discover new posts.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

PodPress - podPress adds a lot of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.  You can also use this plugin to embed regular audio files.

If you use WordPress as your blogging platform what are your favorite plugins?